Emotional Patients Do Not Perceive Medical Consultations and Advices

According to BBC News, patients who are too emotional, anxious and worried about their diagnoses when seeing a specialist are very likely to fail perceiving medical consultations. Even if doctors speak in a detached and calm manner with their patients, the latter are too stressed and emotional to actually pay attention to the physician's advices. Therefore, they get it all wrong and in most cases the patients cannot remember what the doctor told them after they have left the doctor's office.

Noting that most people who go to see a doctor cannot remember even half of the conversation with their physician, psychologists from the University of Marburg, Germany, carried out a study to investigate how patients really perceive doctors' consultations and advices. Their report was published in The Publish Library of Science Medicine, in which scientists urged doctors to verify at the end of one consultation if their patients have memorized what they have been talking about.

Besides not paying attention to consultations, patients also tend to misinterpret what their doctors tell them. For example, emotional patients tend to aggravate the situation and to believe that they suffer from a certain disorder or disease even if their physician has just told them they are free of risk.

In the trial, German researchers asked volunteers to listen to three tapes on which they recorded different information: the first tape contained the voice of a doctor who explained test results to a patient who suffered from abdominal pain; on the second tape was recorded a negative conversation of some people who haven't been invited to a barbecue; the third tape presented a neutral conversation about a car breakdown.

Participants in the study were "emotional" patients, others were patients with depression and finally, there was the third category: healthy people. When asked to retell the information comprised on the tapes, emotional patients had good and accurate memories about the last two tapes (the invitation to the barbecue and the car breakdown) but showed to have misinterpreted all the diagnoses on the first tape to worse ones.

Namely, if the doctor on the first tape told the imaginary patient that he should not be worried about his health condition because he is all right and does not suffer from a disease - the "emotional" patients understood that the doctor told them they are ill with the disease. The same happened in the case of an ambiguous explanation about a diagnose, such as "it is likely that you suffer from..."

In conclusion, German researchers advised doctors to ask their patients, after a consultation, to make a brief account of the conversation they have just had. "This would make it possible to detect when patients have misremembered the likelihood of various medical explanations, and provide an opportunity to correct the situation. This would benefit patients and reduce the strain on health care systems."